idea: transaction ordering in ledger-cli

I love ledger-cli but keeping it in sync with my bank statements drives me crazy. The problem is that the transactions can end up with an essentially arbitrary ordering, and the order they clear (and even the date they clear) is not necessarily under my direct control.

One answer to this is: stop caring about the ordering of your transactions! That’s a decent answer, except that not addressing the ordering issue means that you can only ever have “end-of-day” consistency. This means you need a different report to reconcile the transactions.

It also sidesteps some more fundamental concerns:

• It doesn’t help me figure out if a given transaction is already accounted for in the running transaction total.
• I want my near-term forecast to give me a strong guarantee that I won’t overdraft the account.

I had a quick idea about this. What if instead of having a “clear date”, transactions had a “clearing window” – the earliest date and the latest date that a given transaction is expected to clear.

This doesn’t solve the “put it in order” problem, but the software could construct pathological orderings and generate error conditions to show potential cashflow problems.